The business of a call center is to provide rapid and efficient interaction between agents and customers, or prospective customers. Conventional call center systems determine if agents are being productive and meeting call center targets (called “adherence”) by tracking phone usage of agents. In addition to talking to a customer on the phone, such an agent usually spends time using a PC or workstation application, such as a customer relationship manager (CRM) or a customer account database. The proficiency of an agent on these applications therefore impacts overall call center productivity. However, conventional call center systems do not utilize information about application usage when providing adherence information.
Today's call centers often support various interaction methods and media, including phone, e-mail and messaging applications. Call center systems typically allow some or all of these interactions to be recorded. The recordings may be reviewed later for compliance with business or government regulations, or for quality assurance. These systems also allow a supervisor to monitor interactions, typically to determine if an agent is adhering to call center policies.
In conventional call center systems, the playback of recorded interactions and live monitoring of interactions occurs in an “interactions” application, sometimes known as a “contacts” application. A separate “schedule adherence” application is used to compare agents' scheduled activities with agents' actual activities and to provide information about adherence exceptions to the scheduled activities.